Biographies we love to get into like a big warm foamtub. If you want a real wallow it's best, naturally, to choose such a subject as Jacqueline Susann: a gaudy, noisy existence which demonstrated a lot of courage and generosity as well as petty-mindedness and all-devouring ambition. Millions have found that her books are as readable as her 'life' now proves to be.
It's good sometimes to get away from the worthy so-called idols very few actually read. (I
had Valley of the Dolls pushed into my hands by an Operating Department Assistant--he knew a page turner when he had one.)
You sometimes find that people who call best sellers or pulp chestnuts like the Tarzan books trash don't really want to read at all. Fair enough, not everyone has to. But these types just want to plough through enough to 'show knowledge' as they used to say in the exams, of whatever's regarded as worthwhile or IN. A guy I knew once studied up ferociously on his Samuel Beckett. Now this was a bloke who actually hated books (as he admitted once) but he knew Beckett's works were mercifully short and he could soon get through them and be known as an expert. (Few others had any interest in them, beyond being aware that they were supposed to be important.) He gritted his teeth and forced his way through these thin books with big print.
Authors such as Marie Corelli, Rider Haggard and Henry Miller are all on occasions better writers than snobbery has allowed. They have their dull tracts and their ludicrous ones too, maybe, but they live. Also John Buchan, famously discovered by Susan Hill and championed on TV and radio a few years back.
Jacqueline Susann began to write with a vengeance after her cancer diagnosis. She prayed to be allowed twelve more years, which she got, in order to become a best selling author. Valley of the Dolls was one of the biggest-selling books ever. She had no time for Joyce, she liked authors who could be read. He went
into the garbage. With Proust I fancy she would have hesitated but maybe not--of course her artistic bent was always on the side of the selling rather than the reading and writing--though we shouldn't forget that she could write. The editors helped, granted. But with her gone, where were the editors that would give us another Valley? They tried to hatch their own covey of 'em and failed. There was money in it and by God they tried. They wanted a whole string of salacious showbiz novels. They failed. (Then a decade or so later along came Jackie Collins and her sister.)
What the tamer spirits of our age are still slow to realise is the big scam put over by Pound and Eliot. The sort of snobbery that made English Department Sixth-Formers yearn to know about/like/understand Dante or Petrarch. They had to pretend they did, at any rate, the same as they had to 'enjoy' the Will's Whiffs they blazed away at in the Theatre bar during the interval at Godot.
It's very sad that from The Waste Land and its notes you never got much impression of Frazer's Golden Bough except that it was some kind of great, forbidding work that these Greats had quarried into in all seriousness. Coming at the book in later life and from another angle it's strange how down to earth the sarcastic Scottish professor can seem--the sort any ditch digger or tip-scrabber could talk to. Eliot almost scared us off for life.
But people persist in their snobberies. These idols were set up for all time, if we're not careful.
As for me I like a gutsier talent, as displayed by that great wiry invalid, D.H. Lawrence. That greater basket case Proust too, had something authentic gnawing at him--and what a doorstopper it made him create. Compare that with Eliot's pin point of page-blackening. Eliot wrote with the reputation that he forged early on. His ghost lives off it still. Twenty or thirty pages of imperishable stuff is not bad for a life's work, probably. But people take him as a leviathan of verse, as a taste arbiter. The latter maybe he was--anyway, he retained an ascendancy despite some dead wood poetry that followed up his masterwork, a few risible plays and a lot of essays that were over cautious about saying anything very much.